innermost sanctuary of religion egoism can perhaps find
a way. The thought of that troubled Rosamund in the dark. But when the
hour of dawn grew near she fell asleep. She had made up her mind, or,
rather, it had surely been made up for her. For a conviction had come
upon her that for good or for evil it was meant that her life should
be linked with Dion Leith's. He possessed something which she valued
highly, and which, she thought, was possessed by very few men. He
offered it to her. If she refused it, such an offering would probably
never be made to her again.

To be a lonely woman; to be a subtle and profound egoist; to be loved,
cherished, worshiped; to be a mother.

Many lives of women seemed to float before her eyes.

Just before she lost consciousness it seemed to her, for a moment, that
she was looking into the pathetic eyes of the old man whom she had met
in the fog.

"Poor old man!" she murmured.

She slept.

On the following morning she sent this note to Dion Leith:

"MY DEAR DION,--I will marry you.

"ROSAMUND."

CHAPTER III

In the following spring, Rosamund and Dion were married, and Dion took
Rosamund "to the land of the early morning."

They arrived in Greece at the beginning of May, when the rains were over
and the heats of summer were at hand. The bed of Ilissus was empty. Dust
lay white in the streets of Athens and along the road to Phaleron and
the sea. The low-lying tracts of country were desert-dry, and about
Athens the world was arrayed in the garb of the East. Nevertheless there
was still a delicate freshness in the winds that blew to the little city
from the purple Aegean or from the mountains of Argolis; stirring the
dust into spiral dances among the pale houses upon which Lycabettos
looks down; shaking the tiny leaves of the tressy pepper trees near the
Royal Palace; whispering the antique secrets of the ages into the ears
of the maidens who, unwearied and happily submissive, bear up the Porch
of the Erechtheion; stealing across the vast spaces and between the
mighty columns of the Parthenon. The dawns and the twilights had not
lost the pure savor of their almost frail vitality. The deepness of
slumber still came with the nights.

Greece was, perhaps, at her loveliest. And Greece was almost deserted by
travelers. They had come and gone with the spring, leaving the land to
its own, and to those two who had come there to drink deep at the wells
of happiness. And, a little